Was everyone having it? No. And they weren’t for the reason most people weren’t eating at Arby’s. They didn’t want to be.

Your personal college environment may have varied, though I at least know from secondhand experience that even (or especially) some of the most religious schools were basically poorly-organized orgies that sometimes broke out into learning. I can’t speak to your personal experiences. But at my school, I remind you that I once knew of someone who bungled buying frozen pizza and it somehow resulted in intercourse.

I absolutely don’t say this to insult those who have never had sex. There is nothing inherently better or worse about you as a person when it comes to having or not having sex. The point I’m trying to make is that if people are dedicating their entire lives to it, you’d at least think they’d be good at it.

As an example, consider this second scenario from my second weekend at college.

I was doing some writing on my then-still-functioning computer, likely trying to decide whether or not repeatedly hyphenated compound words were proper grammar. Whatever the case, I was startled when something hit the screen of my window and fell out of sight before I got a good look at it. I gazed out into the night, deciding that at that hour it must’ve been a bat.

“Are you a hot girl?” a voice called from below.

For a moment I wondered if maybe Dracula’s charm had been heavily overrated in the movies. But I looked down to see a group of three boys retrieving a tennis ball. “No!” I called back down.

“No to being hot? Or…no to being a girl?”

I’d never been asked for demographic information through a window before, but I assumed honesty was the best policy – at least insofar as it ended the conversation as quickly as possible. “No to being a girl,” I answered, contemplating how many girls spoke in a low, pleasant baritone like mine. After waiting a beat, I noted, “I’m about a six, hotness-wise. Seven if it’s dark.”

As it was dark at the time, it seemed like an important distinction.

One of them loudly cursed me out for some reason. It likely had to do with some breach of etiquette in responding to being hit on through a window. In my defense, it wasn’t a situation that had come up before. Or, luckily, since.

But the tennis ball continued to bounce off the wall and random windows over the course of the next few hours. (I would later learn they’d been doing this the past week, obviously finding neither success nor a hot girl, apparently.) I paid attention with half an ear while various conversations played out almost exactly as expected. Shockingly, no one wanted to meet their future husband by having a tennis ball thrown at them.

Least of all when they couldn’t seem to grasp that we alternated genders by floor, and had probably spoken to more guys than girls by that point.

“Hey! Are you a hot girl?” the chorus sang again.

“Okay,” a stern voice called from at least two floors above me. “Guys, I know you’re just having fun and all. And I know this seems like a really great idea in your head, but this isn’t going to get you anywhere with girls or anyone else. So knock it off. People are trying to work and you’re being pests.”

“What are you? The lawn RA?” one of the boys outside asked. He and his cohorts slapped hearty high fives.

“Seriously, dude?” the voice called back, not nearly as amused. “I’m your RA. We talked right before you went outside to play your little tennis ball asshole games.” He noted that the conversation had specifically advised not doing so.

Some giggling below suggested the RA’s warning was being taken about as seriously as RAs usually are.

“Yeah, yeah. Ha ha,” the RA grumbled. “I actually have a lot of paperwork to do up here, so I don’t really have time for this. So knock it off. Find some other way to meet hot girls and then scare them off.” He suggested turning around and looking in literally any random direction until they found one outside.

Naturally, the three boys realized the error of their ways and considered the feelings of others. And while I didn’t see it personally, I have it on good authority that they went on a walk that night that ended with all three meeting the women they would eventually marry some years later. As endings to stories go, it’s probably one of the happier ones from my college days.

It’s also a total lie.

No. As pretty much anyone could have predicted, they continued tossing the tennis ball at random windows. I’m not sure if they even wanted to find girls by that point. More likely, they’d given up and were just being pricks. And in that RA’s defense, he actually gave them another ten minutes to get bored and find something else to do before he completely snapped.

At least until they hit his window again, this time hard enough to actually knock his screen out.

I’m sometimes sad that I’m not always privy to the fates of the side characters in my stories once they leave my field of view. It’s a failing inherent to any first-person storytelling and one, I assure you, that often leaves me just as curious as the people reading it. Suffice to say, though, those three were taken into police custody. Whether or not they got their act together later, I can’t say. But I can say with some certainty that none of them found the hot girl they were looking for that night.

Or, if I’m being realistic, any other night either.

That’s sort of the point I’m making here. One of the things that amused me to the very end of my college days was how dead set some students seemed to be on frightening away any sort of sexual intimacy they happened to come across. And that they were, almost without exception, the ones so transfixed on getting laid that they abandoned almost everything else to go looking for it.

I’m not sure there’s a moral to this story. In fact, I would generally view any story about trying to hook up with random girls via tennis ball as not necessarily worthy of a deeper lesson.

Though, if I had to tack one on so this could be published as a children’s book down the road, it would probably be that if you’re trying to find love with tennis balls, try to at least develop a basic understanding of floor plans.

I think one of the more surprising things I learned in college was the number of students there for seemingly any reason besides learning.

Now, I’m not “study-shaming” other students. Nor am I even “grade-shaming.” Everyone works at their own level and has their own style when it comes to getting work done. What I’m saying is, from the moment I arrived until the moment my first semester ended, there were students who – despite having eight weeks to do so – somehow didn’t once end up in a single classroom.

This came in several distinct flavors. Some were from families with more money than common sense who couldn’t grasp that their child didn’t want to be there even when they were told by phone on a nearly daily basis. Others fell into the trite routine of spending their waking hours trying to find any way to get their hands on alcohol, even if the results werealmost universally terrible.

And others, of course, came to college for the ancient and noble purpose of attaching themselves to a matching set of genitalia.

Now, I’m not “slut-shaming” other students. Nor am I even “performance-shaming.” Everyone sexes at their own level and has their own style when it comes to pleasing a partner. What I’m saying is, from the moment I arrived until the moment my first semester ended, there were guys on my floor who – despite trying night and day for eight weeks – somehow didn’t once end up in a single woman.

In short, the only thing more surprising than the the number of students who totally gave up on school to get laid was how tragically bad some of them were at it.

I didn’t go to college to find a girlfriend. I realize that sounds like something people just say when it wasn’t a possibility in the first place. And maybe it is. But I assure you, in that particular college environment, 95% of people who wanted to have sex were having it, as well as about 5-10% of the people who went to the store and just happened upon some sex on the way there.

To demonstrate my point, allow me to walk you through two scenarios from my first few weeks at college.

In the first, one of my floormates was making his rounds to ask if anyone wanted him to pick up something for them while he was at the store. As I was still recovering from my illness at the time, I gave him a ten and asked if he could grab me some frozen pizzas. He returned an hour later with a wad of crumpled bills in his clenched fist and a faraway look in his eyes.

“Were they out of pizza?” I asked, disappointed.

“What?” he said, as if startled to see me in my doorway, after he’d knocked. “Oh, I don’t know. I never made it to the store.”

“How?” I demanded, more confused than angry. Given that the campus store was only about ten feet from the front door, it was entirely possible to tumble down the stairs and end up there just by rolling.

“I don’t really know. I walked out the door and talked to a girl.” He paused, as though the story had ended. It hadn’t. “Then I think I lost my virginity.”

“You…think?”

His expression became contemplative. “Yeah. It happened sort of fast. I was just out the door when I nodded to a girl talking on her phone.” Then, with so little warning I nearly got whiplash, the story took a sudden leap. “Anyway, she was upset and said I looked like her boyfriend from back home and then we started kissing…”

“Oh, then you didn’t lose your virginity,” I clarified.

“After that, she pulled me into the alley and we had sex. Three and a half times.”

I withdrew my previous statement, careful not to say anything that might be misconstrued as curiosity about the “and a half” portion of his explanation.

Ignoring the comment, he said, “She actually looked a lot like my girlfriend back home, too. Except, well, my girlfriend wanted to save herself for marriage after college. That girl didn’t want that. Like, at all.” Something seemed to dawn on him then and his expression grew somber. What I misread as realizing he didn’t even know the stranger’s name was actually something far worse. “Oh. I guess I have to break up with my girlfriend, don’t I?”

I wasn’t sure what to say. I was barely qualified to manage my own life, let alone anyone else’s. “Maybe she’ll understand if you tell her what happened?” I offered.

“Probably not,” he said, not quite sadly. “Because I just came up here to give everyone back their money. I’m going to go back to her room and…” He didn’t actually trail off there. But suffice to say, dear reader, only one of us needs to have the “and a half” explained to them in vivid detail.

He then placed the crumpled bills into my hand and went off to plow a complete stranger who looked vaguely like his very-soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend. I’m kind of a purist when it comes to the sanctity of relationships. Then again, he’d also given me nearly forty dollars instead of the ten I’d originally sent him off with. Let’s not split hairs and pretend anyone was the good person in this story.

Which leads me to the series of ellipses that mean this has gotten too long and I’m ending the first part…

Most of the time I’m listening to music I try not to think too hard about it. If the song was just a solid beat over someone singing a recipe for good Pad Thai, I’d be fine with it.

The musicians would probably be fine with it, too, given that a lot of their writing really doesn’t hold up to even casual scrutiny.

Songs with bad lyrics are a dime a dozen. It’s the reason we have so many different ways to change the radio station in our cars. But this column isn’t about those. (I’ll likely come back to those at a future date.) No, this is about a very particular kind of lyric – the sort that, if taken literally, sounds like the ravings of a crazy person as they try in desperation to defend their street corner from invisible monsters.

As with any list of stupid lyrics, the only rule is that I can only include Pitbull once.

Okay. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt here and assume this is an attempt to get in some woman’s pants. As opposed to what it sounds like – armed robbery.

Of course, as a pick-up line, it’s not much better. I’m sure somebody out there would appreciate your forwardness. The majority, however, would be put off by the random stranger grabbing them and screaming demands at them.

A small but very painful minority would immediately hit you with the bear mace, putting you on the ground long before you were able to repeat it three times.

Kings of Leon – “Sex on Fire”

Youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu, your sex is on fire.

I’ll give it credit. This was pretty much what I should have expected from the title.

I realize that sex talk is filled with euphemisms, but this isn’t one of the better ones. Imagine the confusion you’d cause yelling this mid-coitus. I don’t care what’s going on, if someone yells that your sex has reached the point of auto-ignition, you’re probably going to stop and make sure everything is okay. Maybe do a precautionary “stop, drop and roll” or two.

When it comes to spontaneous genital fire, you can never be too safe.

Nirvana – “Smells like Teen Spirit”

With the lights out it’s less dangerous. Here we are now, entertain us.

It’s hard to pick a specific set of lyrics out of this song because it’s almost impossible to even understand. I never knew what the hell he was singing about until I had to do vocals during a game of “Rock Band 2” almost twenty years later. And this is one of those odd cases where I think I understood the song a bit less once I knew the words to it.

Is there anything you can do with the lights off that’s less dangerous? I mean, whenever I don’t understand something in a song I usually just assume it’s a reference to sex that neither twelve-year-old or thirty-year-old me understood. But that makes the inclusion of a mulatto, an albino, a mosquito and his libido all the creepier.

Unless it’s, like, the most specific fetish of all time. And even then…

Harvey Danger – “Flag Pole Sitta” (a.k.a. that song you thought Green Day did, but didn’t)

I had visions, I was in them. I was looking into the mirror.

The mirror seems to be working as intended then.

Nickelback – “Figured you Out”

I love your lack of self-respect, while you’re passed out on the deck. I love my hands around your neck.

Well, I’ll say one thing for those lyrics – they very nearly all rhyme, at least.

Wow. I won’t say this one takes an ugly turn, because it starts out pretty rough. Nickelback sees a hole and just keeps digging. It’s basically a metaphor for…well, being Nickelback.

I sort of don’t get it, though. You’re choking people after they passed out at barbecues and you’re saying they have a lack of self-respect. I believe there’s an old saying about the pot calling the kettle black. And there’s an even older but less known saying about the pot choking the kettle because it doesn’t have any self-respect.

Perhaps Nickelback is the one who should be looking in the mirror, hmmm?

A Nerd in Edgewise

I'm just a regular nerd, husband and dad trying to make some sense of a crazy world. New random goodness on an equally random schedule. Real life obligations mean I can't commit to set days, but probably two to three times per week.

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